I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
ALAN LIGHTMANI still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
ALAN LIGHTMANI have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
ALAN LIGHTMANWe’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
ALAN LIGHTMANI also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
ALAN LIGHTMANAll other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
ALAN LIGHTMANEach person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
ALAN LIGHTMANI believe that we need to slow down.
ALAN LIGHTMANI picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
ALAN LIGHTMANFranz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
ALAN LIGHTMANThey would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
ALAN LIGHTMANWe have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
ALAN LIGHTMANRather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
ALAN LIGHTMANOne cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN